Deeds, McDonnell face online voters

Less than a month before Virginians go to the polls to choose their next governor, Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds will participate in televised interviews and take questions from voters around the state.

During an hour-long event, sponsored by ABC 7/WJLA-TV, POLITICO, Google and YouTube, the two candidates will answer text and video questions submitted on the Web as well as from the moderators, ABC 7 anchor Leon Harris and POLITICO Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris.

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The “Battleground Virginia” special, part of a series that began during the 2008 presidential race, will air on October 6 on ABC 7/WJLA-TV.

As the race enters its closing weeks, McDonnell, the state’s former attorney general, still holds a lead over his Democratic opponent, according to recent polls, but there are signs that Deeds may be making inroads.

McDonnell leads Deeds by a 4-point margin — 51 percent to 47 percent — among likely Virginia voters, according to a Washington Post poll released over the weekend. The poll, which was conducted from Sept. 14-17, appeared to be good news for Deeds, who trailed McDonnell by 15 points in a Post survey last month.

But another poll out last week, showed McDonnell leading Deeds by a more sizable margin. A Daily Kos/Research 2000 survey of likely Virginia voters released last Friday found McDonnell ahead of Deeds by seven points — 50 percent to 43 percent — with 7 percent of voters who said they were undecided.

Deeds, a state senator from rural Bath County, has never been in as strong a position against his Republican opponent as he was shortly after winning a contentious three-way Democratic primary in June. A Rasmussen Reports poll on June 11 showed Deeds leading McDonnell 47 percent to 41 percent.

Deeds’s numbers have been slipping ever since, and throughout the summer he has sought to open up new lines of attack against McDonnell — most of which have been aimed at painting his opponent into a conservative corner.

At their first face-to-face debate in July, the two nominees suggested that social issues would not play a major role in the campaign, but that quickly changed.

In recent weeks, the Deeds campaign seized on a 1989 master’s thesis written by McDonnell, then 34 years old, in which he called working women and feminists “detrimental” to the family and wrote that government policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.”

The issue came up again in a debate between the two candidates on Thursday, forcing McDonnell to play defense.

“Nobody in the world had read that thesis,” McDonnell said. “Now that’s all my opponent wants to talk about.”

McDonnell has sought to assure voters that his views on many of the issues he wrote about in the 20-year-old paper, which was unearthed by The Washington Post, have changed. Last week, his campaign went on the air with a television ad responding to the criticism over the thesis.